JANUARY 28. (Sunday.)
I shall have enough to do in Jamaica if I accept all the offices that are pressed upon me. A large body of negroes, from a neighbouring estate, came over to Cornwall this morning, to complain of hard treatment, in various ways, from their overseer and drivers, and requesting me to represent their injuries to their trustee here, and their proprietor in England. The charges were so strong, that I am certain that they must be fictitious; however, I listened to their story with patience; promised that the trustee (whom I was to see in a few days) should know their complaint;—and they went away apparently satisfied. Then came a runaway negro, who wanted to return home, and requested me to write a few lines to his master, to save him from the lash. He was succeeded by a poor creature named Bessie, who, although still a young woman, is dispensed with from labour, on account of her being afflicted with the cocoa-bay, one of the most horrible of negro diseases. It shows itself in large blotches and swellings, and which generally, by degrees, moulder away the joints of the toes and fingers, till they rot and drop off; sometimes as much as half a foot will go at once. As the disease is communicable by contact, the person so afflicted is necessarily shunned by society; and this poor woman, who is married to John Fuller, one of the best young men on the estate, and by whom she has had four children (although they are all dead), has for some time been obliged to live separated from him, lest he should be destroyed by contracting the same complaint. She now came to tell me, that she wanted a blanket, “for that the cold killed her of nights;” cold being that which negroes dislike most, and from which most of their illnesses arise. Of course she got her blanket; then she said, that she wanted medicine for her complaint. “Had not the doctor seen her?”
“Oh, yes! Dr. Goodwin; but the white doctor could do her no good. She wanted to go to a black doctor, named Ormond, who belonged to a neighbouring gentleman.” I told her, that if this black doctor understood her particular disease better than others, certainly she should go to him; but that if he pretended to cure her by charms or spells, or any thing but medicine, I should desire his master to cure the black doctor by giving him the punishment proper for such an impostor. Upon this Bessie burst into tears, and said “that Ormond was not an Obeah man, and that she had suffered too much by Obeah men to wish to have any more to do with them. She had made Adam her enemy by betraying him, when he had attempted to poison the former attorney; he had then cursed her, and wished that she might never be hearty again: and from that very time her complaint had declared itself; and her poor pickaninies had all died away, one after another; and she was sure that it was Adam who had done all this mischief by Obeah.” Upon this, I put myself in a great rage, and asked her “how she could believe that God would suffer a low wicked fellow like Adam to make good people die, merely because he wished them dead?”
“She did not know; she knew nothing about God; had never heard of any such Being, nor of any other world.” I told her, that God was a great personage, “who lived up yonder above the blue, in a place full of pleasures and free from pains, where Adam and wicked people could not come; that her pickaninies were not dead for ever, but were only gone up to live with God, who was good, and would take care of them for her; and that if she were good, when she died, she too would go up to God above the blue, and see all her four pickaninies again.” The idea seemed so new and so agreeable, to the poor creature, that she clapped her hands together, and began laughing for joy; so I said to her every thing that I could imagine likely to remove her prejudice; told her that I should make it a crime even so much as to mention the word Obeah on the estate; and that, if any negro from that time forward should be proved to have accused another of Obeahing him, or of telling another that he had been Obeahed, he should forfeit his share of the next present of salt-fish, which I meant soon to distribute among the slaves, and should never receive any favour from me in future; so I gave Bessie a piece of money, and she seemed to go away in better spirits than she came.
This Adam, of whom she complained, is a most dangerous fellow, and the terror of all his companions, with whom he lives in a constant state of warfare. He is a creole, born on my own property, and has several sisters, who have obtained their freedom, and are in every respect creditable and praiseworthy; and to one of whom I consider myself as particularly indebted, as she was the means of saving poor Richard’s life, when the tyranny of the overseer had brought him almost to the brink of the grave. But this brother is in every thing the very reverse of his sisters: there is no doubt of his having (as Bessie stated) infused poison into the water-jars through spite against the late superintendent. It was this same fellow whom Edward suspected of having put into his brother-in-law’s head the idea of his having been bewitched; and it was also in his hut that the old Obeah man was found concealed, whom my attorney seized and transported last year. He is, unfortunately, clever and plausible; and I am told that the mischief which he has already done, by working upon the folly and superstition of his fellows, is incalculable; yet I cannot get rid of him: the law will not suffer any negro to be shipped off the island, until he shall have been convicted of felony at the sessions; I cannot sell him, for nobody would buy him, nor even accept him, if I would offer them so dangerous a present; if he were to go away, the law would seize him, and bring him back to me, and I should be obliged to pay heavily for his re-taking and his maintenance in the workhouse. In short, I know not what I can do with him, except indeed make a Christian of him! This might induce the negroes to believe, that he had lost his infernal power by the superior virtue of the holy water; but, perhaps he may refuse to be christened. However, I will at least ask him the question; and if he consents, I will send him—and a couple of dollars—to the clergyman—for he shall not have so great a distinction as baptism from massa’s own hand—and see what effect “white Obeah” will have in removing the terrors of this professor of the black.
As to my sick Obeah patient, Pickle, from the moment of his reconciliation with his brother-inlaw he began to mend, and has recovered with wonderful rapidity: the fellow seems really grateful for the pains which I have taken about him; and our difficulty now is to prevent his fancying himself too soon able to quit the hospital, so eager is he to return “to work for massa.”
There are certainly many excellent qualities in the negro character; their worst faults appear to be, this prejudice respecting Obeah, and the facility with which they are frequently induced to poison to the right hand and to the left. A neighbouring gentleman, as I hear, has now three negroes in prison, all domestics, and one of them grown grey in his service, for poisoning him with corrosive sublimate; his brother was actually killed by similar means; yet I am assured that both of them were reckoned men of great humanity. Another agent, who appears to be in high favour with the negroes whom he now governs, was obliged to quit an estate, from the frequent attempts to poison him; and a person against whom there is no sort of charge alleged for tyranny, after being brought to the doors of death by a cup of coffee, only escaped a second time by his civility, in giving the beverage, prepared for himself to two young book-keepers, to both of whom it proved fatal. It, indeed, came out, afterwards, that this crime was also effected by the abominable belief in Obeah: the woman, who mixed the draught, had no idea of its being poison; but she had received the deleterious ingredients from an Obeah man, as “a charm to make her massa good to her;” by which the negroes mean, the compelling a person to give another every thing for which that other may ask him.
Next to this vile trick of poisoning people (arising, doubtless, in a great measure, from their total want of religion, and their ignorance of a future state, which makes them dread no punishment hereafter for themselves, and look with but little respect on human life in others), the greatest drawback upon one’s comfort in a Jamaica existence seems to me to be the being obliged to live perpetually in public. Certainly, if a man was desirous of leading a life of vice here, he must have set himself totally above shame, for he may depend upon every thing done by him being seen and known. The houses are absolutely transparent; the walls are nothing but windows—and all the doors stand wide open. No servants are in waiting to announce arrivals: visiters, negroes, dogs, cats, poultry, all walk in and out, and up and down your living-rooms, without the slightest ceremony.
Even the Temple of Cloacina (which, by the bye, is here very elegantly spoken of generally as “The Temple,”) is as much latticed and as pervious to the eye as any other part of my premises; and many a time has my delicacy been put to the blush by the ill-timed civility of some old woman or other, who, wandering that way, and happening to cast her eye to the left, has stopped her course to curtsy very gravely, and pay me the passing compliment of an “Ah, massa! bless you, massa! how day?”